ScienceAlert adds that “the force of the blast was 10,000 times that of a hydrogen bomb” and the decibel level reached 172, which had to be unbearably punishing since the pain threshold is 130 dB and the decibel scale is logarithmic.

It’s obviously hard to protect yourself against this sort of event, which happened over 125 years ago, but the reports of the world’s loudest known noise is instructive: noise is destructive.